PREPARE TO BELIEVE | DANE CERVINE The Creation Museum sits minutes away from the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. Providing a purported glimpse of the world just after the Fall from the Garden of Eden, this $27 million “natural history museum” was recently created by an organization called the Answers In Genesis ministry. My wife had visited the museum last year with her siblings, who live nearby. Awestruck and dumbfounded, she insisted this trip that I go too, take our 16-year-old daughter because it was too difficult to explain, I just had to see it. Given my upbringing in the evangelical Church of the Nazarene, I could imagine what was waiting for me, so I approached this odd field trip with equal measures of attraction and repulsion. I was born into the church, with at least two generations of preachers on my mother’s side, my own father spending three years as a pastor before being given an ultimatum to conform or leave the ministry, because of his attendance at an interfaith prayer group that engaged in “speaking in tongues.” Not all evangelicals are the same, rife with similar schisms as factions of politicians and sects of economists. Some of my earliest memories are common, though, among evangelicals—that of going down to the altar, weeping, asking forgiveness for an amalgam of vague childhood guilt and existential lack. As I grew older, I was more consciously “born again” the summer before entering high school when the Jesus Movement swept through rural Atwater, California. True believers as cool hippies playing rock music. I became a young bible study teacher for fellow believers older than I, and I truly believed. God was an immanent, intimate presence, a daily companion. The bible was the literal word of God, handed down through the generations, an unbroken link to the heart and mind of the great divine Parent. I felt safe, moored, at home in a world that had gone bad, but could still be redeemed. I attended my parent’s alma mater, a Nazarene college in southern California. Finally, my evolving belief that God must be bigger than the small box of tenets I was raised in got me in trouble with the professors and resident assistants who feared for my soul. I would talk about how “we are all a part of God, as though cells within a body” and how different religions must be like different dialects of the same spiritual language. This did not go over well. So I transferred to the University of California at Santa Cruz, whose redwood forests and stone quarries birthed me yet again into a broader study of psychology and religion. World religions and Freud provided the combustible mix necessary to open my psyche to new light, but this time in rainbow colors rather than the single fundamental shade of Jehovah’s white beard. After graduating with a degree in psychology and religion, I engaged in graduate study at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco where I became a licensed therapist. A certain internal presence remained constant, though I no longer attempted to give it a single name. My experience supported a simple metaphor: that divinity, like water, remains the same seminal experience whether described as agua, eau, wasser, mizu, neeru, or amanzi—though shaped by the particular medium (culture, historical) in which it it is experienced, be it the ocean, a lake or stream, a swimming pool, in a cool glass, or hands outstretched in the rain. So, this last afternoon in Kentucky before we fly back to California, my family and I head down Highway 275 to catch the last hour of the tour at the Creation Museum. But wouldn’t you know, we are quickly bedeviled by traffic backed up to a standstill not two miles from the turnoff to the museum. We inch ahead as the minutes rush by, and I even muster a silent prayer to get us in somehow. Finally we make the turnoff, drive into the wide parking lot past a Creation Museum security guard and his black SUV. My daughter and I hop out, run to the glass doors, look wildly about for which way to go, scamper down the empty corridors till we find the ticket counter, where several young adults are tallying their cash registers. Out of breath, we ask if there’s still time to do a quick tour, but the young lady says she’s so sorry but the museum is closed now, to come back tomorrow. I point out that though the doors close at 5 p.m., visitors can stay till 6 p.m. and its only 5:20, and we can still glide through on our own to see at least some of the museum. The young lady smiles, obeys the letter of the law, shakes her head despite my further entreaties that we’ve flown all the way from California, that it’s our last day, that there was an accident. While she remains unmoved, a nearby security guard with handless microphone attached to his head waves me over, winks, says “they probably won’t like this, but I’ll get you in…”. As though God had personally spoken to him, winked, said it was ok, that we needed to get in for our spiritual well-being, given that we were from California and all. So without even having to pay the $20 tickets apiece, he ushers us into the entrance and waves us on. I put my hands together over my heart with a slight bow, looking I’m sure mildly Christian, although the gesture is a traditional Hindu acknowledgement of the God within each of us. Inside, it is stunning, the exhibits shiny and new, so scientific in appearance. There is a wall length portrayal of the Big Bang from a scientific perspective with the title Science Says, and next to it a similar depiction of creation taken literally from the Bible, six days of creation with the seventh for rest, with the title God Says. No symbolic interpretations that might allow, in the bible’s own words, for God’s day to be as a thousand years, or a billion—just the literal truth preserved for us. A universe created about four thousand B.C. (sorry Buddha and Plato), the dinosaurs alive the same time as people, Adam and Eve’s children having sex with each other because it was okay back then in order to populate the earth. The Tyrannosaurus Rex was not a predatory meat-eater, because there were only herbivores, and no poisonous frogs or snakes. Huge life-like displays of early times, the huge ark, videos of how the Great Flood created in a few months the layering of seeming eons of geological time that scientists unearth today. My daughter gasps now and then, says this isn’t right. She’s in the middle of studying biology and history at school, sputters that they can’t just ignore science, gets herself all worked up. I playfully hush her, say “don’t make a scene, they might put us in some kind of Creation Museum purgatory till we come to our senses.” And as if on cue, a security guard with a large German-shepherd dog comes patrolling down the hallway. The guards all have god-like smiles, radio head-sets, and are omnipresent. This one patrols to make sure no-one tries to stay behind, or causes trouble. Would have been handy back in the Garden of Eden, I think to myself as we wind our way towards the end. Though I am steeped in this theology, I am still surprised by how uncompromisingly unrelenting belief can be. My daughter has never been exposed to such bare fundamentalism, and remains incredulous throughout. I am more wistful, a little sad, remembering my early days when the world seemed this tidy, and I could trace the careful corners of God’s box, seamless, that surrounded me as a square womb, a seductive nest, a way of never really being born. Dane Cervine is a widely published poet who lives in Santa Cruz, California, where he serves as chief of children's mental health for the county. He blogs at Dane Cervine Writes.http://danecervine.typepad.comshapeimage_1_link_0



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